Just when you thought that lengthy quarantining might mean you’d have a chance to get completely caught up on the Internet, Twenty One Pilots have come along to remind you that that goal remains ever so slightly out of grasp, with a spontaneously regenerating new music video that bears the promise of being endless.
“Level of Concern (Never Ending Video)” starts the music anew every three minutes and 40 seconds, but there’s a constant stream of new imagery submitted by fans of the duo, interspersed among occasional shots from Twenty One Pilots’ original “Level of Concern” music video.
The song itself, with its lockdown theme (“Won’t you be my little quarantine?”), has been No. 1 on the alternative radio chart in the six weeks since its release, amassing what their label says is 150 million global streams prior to the new mega-video’s release.
The group has a submission page for fan footage of anywhere from 3-30 seconds up at https://loc.twentyonepilots.com/.
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By early afternoon after the midnight video release, fans were saying that tens of thousands of fan video contributions had already flashed across the live YouTube stream,.
Prior to the video being unveiled early Tuesday morning, fans had to jump through a lot more hurdles to find that page and be among the first to upload their video footage to the site. Amid their digestible radio hits, Twenty One Pilots have also been all about mythos and Easter eggs to keep the faithful engaged, and this campaign was no exception. Before devotees were even tipped off about the video, the duo set up a landing page for an alternate reality game (ARD) at https://usb.twentyonepilots.com/, which led to a series of puzzles and clues to be unlocked that finally resulted in finding the upload link.
Director Jason Zada developed the game with Twenty One Pilots, as well as the video. Altogether, 20 clues were needed to complete the game, hidden everywhere from the closed captions of the original “Level of Concern” video to a “glitched” photo file that revealed a directive when it was opened in a text editing program.
The group is making the most of “Level of Concern,” its first new song since the “Trench” album two years ago. Besides the official clip and the new regenerating fan-footage video, Twenty One Pilots also released a “live from outside” alternate version and filmed yet another for “The Tonight Show.”
